So You Want to Write Kid Lit?

During the workshop on culturally responsive teaching, you perk up when they begin talking about children’s literature. A book can be a window or a mirror. At libraries, bookstores, and in your classroom, you thumb through pages, noticing where your students might see a reflection of themselves. You remember the books you used to teach with at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum — The Name Jar, My Name is Yoon — and the stories of immigrant neighbors connecting over shared experiences. You think, if you ever wrote a book, you’d want it to be part of this body of work. It would hold a mirror to some of your students and open a window onto others. 

You’re teaching ESL now and you see your colleagues making and printing their own books when they can’t find the thing they need — a bilingual Spanish/English nonfiction text, an early reader in Haitian Creole. Your own book ideas percolate. The pandemic provides unexpected isolation and a quieting of the daily routine. This is the space you need to flesh out your idea. On long drives to Maine to see your family (your COVID bubble), you capture story ideas in your voice memo app. Later you begin writing a poem with rhyming verses about the different English learners you’ve worked with. You imagine them all meeting each other in a fictional city on the brink of spring. It flows like a song. This doesn’t surprise you. You’ve been writing poems since first grade and performing in musicals since second. 

You try on the idea that your story could become a book in the hands of a child. You know next to nothing about the publishing industry, so you hire a coach from Grub Street Boston. On Zoom, she teaches you how to pitch your book idea in a few words and how a query letter should look. Subscribe to Publisher’s Marketplace, she tells you. Begin looking for publishers that are putting out books with a similar message to yours. For $30 a month you become a member and begin to send query letters. You tell them why your book will fit well among their other titles and how your values align. You get a lot of rejection, some personalized and some automated. There’s a mantra hanging in the air around you: You could be the one. It’s something your niece randomly screamed at you one day when she was two and you find it useful in so many scenarios. 

You continue to send query letters and talk about your book idea. Another author you meet tells you that your story might find a home with Tilbury House Publishers in Maine. You send your manuscript and receive an email response which you don’t yet know is a turning point in your journey. They can’t publish your book, but they make suggestions: Lose the rhyme. Just tell your story, incorporate repetitive phrases, and add a surprise ending. Back to Grub Street where a new coach sends you helpful revisions. It sounds more like a story now and less like a poem. 

You correspond with Tilbury House, politely, doggedly for a year. Any scrap of feedback they give you gets incorporated. Every new draft gets shared with them. You have nothing to lose and everything to learn. Rejection is a familiar colleague — you were an actor in NYC. You just keep going. You buy a copy of Writing Picture Books by Ann Whitford Paul and you decide to make a book dummy. You think of a quote from The Artist’s Way: “Trust that still, small voice that says, ‘This might work and I’ll try it.’” You print and cut the text of your manuscript and arrange it on pages of thick watercolor paper. You use a paint set you got in middle school to make rough illustrations. Your Grub Street coach asked you to imagine where there should be a page turn and how much text you’d want on each page. You read your book dummy out loud to kids. It’s your clinical trial or market research. They like the story and tell you which parts they find the most interesting. 

After an exhausting day of teaching middle school social studies, you sit down in your still, dark classroom to check your personal email. There’s no one around to hear you squeal or see the tears well in your eyes when you read the words: We’re ready to offer you a contract. You call your mother and celebrate together over the phone. 

It will take a year and a half for the book to come out. During that time, you email back and forth with the publisher about illustrators. I’d like the illustrator to be an English learner and an immigrant to the U.S., you offer. It must be an immigrant, they return. You find the talented Luciana Navarro Powell. Like the characters in the book, she has a coming-here story. Her illustrations are ornate but dreamy, offering the eyes a soft place to land while revealing the complicated journey of immigrants and refugees. On the dedication page she writes “... and may the United States continue to be welcoming.” It is 2023 and you and she share a dark foreboding and a sense of urgency to put this book into the world. In another two years she will receive an award from the International Latino Book Awards for these illustrations, but you don’t know that yet. 

The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators holds a conference the following spring, and you talk with other authors about how to do a book tour. You begin marketing yourself to schools and bookshops. You look for businesses that will appreciate the message of your book. You make a postcard and business card. You re-open your Instagram account. 

Another silent celebration happens when a box of 10 copies of your book arrives. You tear it open in the front hall of your building and sit on the stairs cradling your book in your arms. There are school visits, Zoom presentations, interviews, and many thank yous ahead. For now, you hug Listen, Wonder, Ask to your chest and relish the feeling of having made something good and useful and beautiful. You have made a book.